SpaceFoundation.org Website: Sun Background Time Lapse

05/14/2012

The Space Foundation's website header features a continually updated image of the Sun peeking through the "windows" at the top of the home page. The featured image, which is refreshed every hour, is a very high resolution image of the Sun taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA).

The actual image is the entire Sun, but we use a circular grid scoring system that determines which angle has the most "interesting" solar activity. The angle with the brightest colors along specified points wins, and that activity rotates to feature the "coolest" (or dare we say "hottest") solar activity in the website header.

Just for fun, we did a timelapse of just a short amount of time, showing that there really is a lot going on on the Sun.